Shoot Some Pool And Make Some Decisions

ON THE LOOSE

That thought struck me last week while I was waiting for some people to go to the Fringe Festival and I didn't have anything to do.

From where I sat, on the porch of the new City Hall, right down from the famed Asparagus Statue, I was within a fairly easy walk of where most of this town's movers and shakers do their shaking and moving, and I had an hour to kill.

I don't shop, so the choices were to go to a restaurant, go to a bar or just sit there and wait. Even if I did shop, there weren't a lot of choices - I didn't need a wig.

I was facing the same limited options that the people who make our decisions face every time they have a free hour downtown.

If I had to pick the first-, second- and third-worst places in the world to get any decision-making productivity out of, it would be restaurants, bars and office buildings. I'm not sure in what order.

There's no sense of perspective in an office and no way of getting one. When you sit behind the biggest desk in a room full of people who are overpaid to agree with you, your self-estimation is liable to be off by a couple of decimal points. A decimal of variance at the muzzle can translate into being way off target when you're shooting for good sense.

Luckily, most people with bigger desks seem to sense this, so they put off their significant work until lunch hour.

And here is where the problem sets in.

I don't think you can make sound decisions when people are watching you chew. There's too much pressure.

I also doubt that you respect any input that comes with a sprayed mist of salad dressing. Plus you've got all the stress of possibly having to pay for your own lunch. This is not a good, interactive environment.

That's why we need a pool hall. Not just a bar or a restaurant that happens to have a little rinky-dink coin-operated pool table in it either. I mean a real pool hall - a second floor walk-up with a narrow, dark stairway, a long room full of 18,000-ton slate tables lighted by Budweiser lamps and a proprietor named Tuggs with at least one visible physical deformity to scare off children.

The place ought to have a sign in it that says ''Gambling, Profanity and the Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages on Premises Will NOT (underlined) Be Tolerated.''

There ought to be a soft-drink machine so all the old men cussing and gambling at the snooker table would have something to mix in with their whiskey. It's not good for old men to drink straight whiskey.

If you want an honest opinion about an idea or a decision you're pondering, this is the place to bring it up. Bashfulness and tact are not pool-shooter traits.

This is no place for airs. You're not going to impress anybody in a real pool hall with anything other than pool shooting. There's no eye contact. Just enough of your mind is occupied with the game to free up the rest of it for the real thinking you might need to do. Peanut-butter crackers make a great lunch.

And it's a known fact that standing on one foot to make a hard-to-reach shot helps drain excessive ego fluid from the brain - especially when you miss the shot.

A bad decision can't live in this environment.

In fact, if my invitation to go to the Fringe Festival had come up at a pool hall instead of in a restaurant, it would have been shot down quicker than an Iraqi jet pilot with hostile intentions. Why would I want to go to a ''Fringe'' Festival? Heck, the middle is starting to look weird to me; I've got no business out on the edge.

But I agreed to go. It's the kind of decision that has lunch written all over it. I bet the idea to build that Asparagus Statue was born the same way. I bet I know what vegetable they were having, too.

I'm not saying that going to the Fringe Festival and building the Asparagus Statue are bad things.

We might even need a Fringe Festival and a Shakespeare Festival, two wig shops, a haunted house, a store that sells underwear made out of inner tubes and scrap metal, a half-dozen ''clubs'' that double as day-care centers for children with purple hair and bad attitudes, two Elton John concerts and all those many restaurants, banks, bars and bums.

These things are all part of our rich cultural diversity. But I think our diversity would be a tad richer if we had at least one legitimate pool hall for people like me and the people I vote for to go make decisions in.

I might even open one myself. Maybe I'll call up some investors and we can talk about it. Over lunch.